Propensity modelling attempts to predict the likelihood that visitors, leads and customers will perform certain actions. It’s a statistical approach that accounts for all the independent and confounding variables that affects said behaviour. The propensity score, then, is the actual probability that the visitor, lead, or customer will perform a certain action.

  Peoples habits are changing - Are you adapting?

We’re looking forward to attending this year’s Digital Customer Experience conference. The 2019 conference will be hosted by Trade Conferences International (TCI) on the 4th and 5th of September at the Indaba Hotel, Fourways, Johannesburg.

What is Genius Leads? Principa’s Genius Leads is a POPI compliant provision service of South African consumer leads. We use advanced analytics and Machine Learning to optimise lists of new or existing marketing leads, so you target your most desirable customers and those profiled as most likely to respond to your campaign – improving campaign take-up and long-term customer profitability.

Most websites or apps lately have a chat function, whether that be an AI-powered chatbot or a live chat function. But many people (and some businesses) don’t know the difference between the two and aren’t sure when they are talking to (or have installed) a bot or an agent.

What is Atura? Atura is a powerful artificial intelligence chat solution that uses cloud technology to deliver the right answers to your customers via any device, albeit mobile, desktop or tablet. Built on the Microsoft Azure technology stack, Atura uses its advanced algorithms and machine learning techniques to correctly understand your customer request and then deliver the correct response. In the event that the AI doesn’t understand the customer request, the entire messaging conversation can be seamlessly redirected to a physical agent to further respond to your customer. The result: a fluent and seamless customer experience!

Deciding on which cloud service to host your core business systems on can be a daunting task. Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure are two of the biggest players around, while Google Cloud and IBM Cloud are also gaining market-share.

Innovative companies know they must embrace digital transformation in their business to stay competitive in the world of the fourth industrial revolution. But legacy systems often get in the way of transformation. In this blog, we look at why companies are reluctant to move away from their legacy systems and how to know when it really is time to modernise.

What is Agent X? Agent X is a call centre virtual assistant that not only guides and supports agents during calls, but motivates and inspires high performance via an engaging, dynamic and intuitive interface.

In an outbound sales environment, the agent needs to work through a long list of customers and the more information available to the agent on the customer, the better.

Our final roundup this year covers two of our main topics: customer acquisition and customer engagement. We’ve not covered these topics in depth this year, and so decided to combine these two to provide a roundup of the best of both.

What is MarketWise? MarketWise is an audience of online users within South Africa which can be segmented and arranged according to a brand or advertisers target market. Online ads can then be served to this audience as they browse the internet.

A multinational luxury vehicle brand interested in promoting brand awareness through a display video banner were looking to increase action by improving campaign CTR at a lower CPC.

 Meet Vusi, a call centre agent, with call centre agent struggles. He needs to keep his customers engaged while he shifts between various systems to find the information he needs to meet his manager’s expectations of consistent, successful call outcomes.

Positioning is one of the most powerful marketing concepts a brand has at its disposal. (Click to Tweet!) Whether you’re a luxury vehicle designer or a value-based grocery store chain, you’ve likely spent a lot of resources perfecting and cementing your positioning, on your way to success.

Geo-location analytics, or location intelligence, is a powerful tool for marketers, developers and businesses in general. It’s defined as the analysis of IP address data to determine a user’s location, which gives a great deal of insight into the user, their behaviour and opportunities.

Geo-location analytics is defined as the analysis of IP address data to determine a user’s location. With geo-location being the new buzzword in marketing, brands who ignore this powerful tool risk losing out on a valuable way of reaching new customers.

With direct marketing, you likely have a benchmark success rate from previous similar campaigns that you base your goals on, and you try to optimise it through various strategies, whether by trying to offer the best deals or by using behavioural tactics.

There are many benefits to using a data-driven approach to lead selection, including higher conversion rates and improved ROI. In this second blog of our mini-series on using advanced data analytics in your acquisition strategy, we’ll discuss the data that will form the basis of your approach.

Every marketer is faced with a common challenge: improving conversion rates of your marketing campaigns whilst optimising marketing spend. This sounds straightforward (or so every non-marketer thinks), but is actually much easier said than done, at least when using traditional approaches.

Ever wondered how to calculate the best mix of actions in order to achieve the desired result within budget? You might have a pretty good idea of what mix has worked well in the past, but how much rigour goes into that process? Wouldn’t you like a mathematical approach that eliminates the guesswork?

As a Marketer or Customer Engagement professional, imagine the cost-savings if you knew who in your database or lead list were likely to be the most profitable customers or most likely to respond? Would you bother mailing a list of a million contacts if you knew that only 100,000 of those contacts were worth targeting and very likely to respond? Innovation is not necessarily the invention of something new, but be the result of finding a new use for an existing product, service, methodology or practice. Take the use of predictive scoring in Marketing. Scoring is no longer only about identifying credit-worthy customers, but is now being used by marketers to identify "target-worthy" leads or customers.

Machine learning is revolutionising how companies are capitalising on Big Data to develop their marketing strategies. While the term encompasses a broad spectrum of technologies and approaches, in a marketing context it can be used to improve targeting, response rates and overall marketing ROI. To put it simply, machine learning involves the automated analysis of large volumes of data – such as consumer spending habits and purchasing behaviour, as well as demographic information – and using a mathematical algorithm and a computer to identify patterns and trends. The algorithm then tests predictions based on historical campaign data and learns from the predictions it gets right. With time, these algorithms become highly accurate as more data from campaign results is added.

Machine learning is helping brands narrow the divide between their products and consumers in ways that would appear almost magical only ten years ago. From Amazon's personal product recommendations based on past purchases and browsing habits, to Netflix's uncanny ability to suggest just the right movie title according to your taste in film, data-driven insights are helping companies speak to individual customer preferences, who are demanding more personalisation in their products and engagements. This has moved data analytics from novelty status to an integral part of the marketing strategy, as brands discover new opportunities to communicate their unique selling points.

The aim of a marketing director is simple: 1) to get your brand noticed by the right people and 2) to get the right people to choose it over your competitors’. As we all know, that task is becoming both more difficult and easier every day. With the rise of social media and mobile marketing it has become increasingly easy and cost-effective to reach a large audience. And the time required to do so has been cut dramatically. As a result, however, it has also become more difficult to compete for attention as the traditional barriers to building a brand, such as budget and geography, dissipate.

Machine learning is a subfield of data science that involves the use of algorithms and computing systems capable of learning on their own from new data as it becomes available, identifying patterns and automatically adapting to predict or anticipate future outcomes with an increasing degree of accuracy. For marketers, what this means is the ability to predict customer behaviour and make relevant and personalised offers on the fly to acquire, retain or grow your most profitable customers.

At Forrester Research’s Groundswell for Excellence in Social Media Awards ceremony held in April this year, winners were recognised for their innovative use of social media to drive awareness of their brands, delight customers with quality content, and reach more people than could ever have been possible in a world without tweets and shares. I’ve been somewhat puzzled by talk of social media, as a marketing platform at least, being on its last legs. The way I see it is that social is only shifting into higher gear and looking at how this year’s Forrester Research winners leveraged the medium to up their relationship marketing game, social media is still very much alive and kicking. You can read more about this year’s winners and submissions here.

Since the days of the first radio broadcast in 1922, it took a short span of only ten years for half of the American public to adopt the new medium of the time. Marketers soon caught on to the inherent opportunities in radio transmissions, and in 1922, the first radio advertisements were broadcast to millions of listeners. Today, we’re in a similar situation with data analytics rising in prominence and marketers shifting their strategies to become more pre-emptive in the way they engage consumers. Strangely, however, it seems that not all “modern marketers” are heeding the call for data-driven strategies. A Forrester Research survey concluded that out of over 500 B2B and B2C respondents, only 11% of marketers scored well enough to be categorised as modern, data-driven marketers.

Human psychology is a fascinating thing. As marketers, one of the many roles we play is of psychologist and, at times, of fortune teller. A good understanding of human behaviour and a high EQ are fundamental requirements for us to develop strategies and campaigns that will influence changes in perception and behaviour, and ultimately trigger an action: a click, a download, an email, a “Like,” a “follow” or a “retweet.”